I was just thinking randomly about this, at what point do Americans become their own ethnicity? Is there a certain timeline before people can say they’re half American? I’m not much of an expert with Yugoslavia, but ever since it broke up people from this region will specifically claim an ethnicity from one of the countries that Yugoslavia broke into as an ethnicity. I wonder why it’s not the same with the USA.
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Because there’s no American ethnicity. There are native Americans but the rest of us don’t share that and are different things
Aside from Native Americans, there isn’t one, cause everyone else either immigrated or were kidnapped and forced to pick plants for rich lazy people.
Your nationality can be American though.
If go to another country, I’m American.
If I’m in the US and trying to describe how one guy is black, another is white with blonde hair, and another is white with black hair and slightly tan skin; then you get into nationalities
I think it’s going to change when we decide to change it. I’m Irish and have been to Ireland, but I wouldn’t say I could move over there and feel like my ancestors never left. I’m a white dude from New Hampshire and I fit in here more than anywhere else in the world, so that’s what I am
For that to happen the US would have to be genetically isolated from the outside world. It never has been and it never will be. Even if they do build a border wall.
It won’t, and shouldn’t. The land of opportunity shouldn’t have those arbitrary barriers.
>I’m not much of an expert with Yugoslavia, but ever since it broke up people from this region will specifically claim an ethnicity from one of the countries that Yugoslavia broke into as an ethnicity. I wonder why it’s not the same with the USA.
To use your example; The difference between the US and Yugoslavia is that Yugoslavia broke up, mostly, along ethnic lines, so now the ethnicities and the countries themselves are largely one and the same. Slovenia is mostly Slovenes, Serbia is mostly Serbs, Croatia is Mostly Croats, Etc. Obviously this is slightly reductive, but the idea is there.
The US is, and has been largely since the beginning, a metric shit-ton of different ethnicities mostly sharing space. Those Ethnicities have not homogenized or mixed enough to justify calling them a single ethnicity or anything even remotely close.
I grew up in Ohio. Moved to New Jersey when I was sixteen. First day in high school I was asked “What are you?”
The question made no sense. “A girl” was the best I could come up with.
That night I asked my dad “what I was”.
An American.
Not “love it or leave it” kind of stuff, just a simple answer to a question I later understood to be an attempt at finding out where my people sat on the Mayflower.
As if……
It’s a revolutionary republic, so, they defined themselves as American.
Afirst glance it would seem that after enough time the American ethnicity would be vaguely brown mixed from everyone having a little of everyone.
This doesn’t work in reality because other countries in the world are very genetically isolated and America has a lot of immigrants every year. So even if your lineage is dozens of born Americans genetically, all you need is one person in the family lineage to marry an immigrant and that baby is 50% American mix and 50% homogenous foreign country.
I dont think it can, too many people immigrate to the US for this to happen. How rare is it to find someone with significant lineage to even the civil war? And that was only what like 4-5 generations ago?
Thats what makes me love America though. No matter what ethnicity you are, or where you came from, if you are a citizen you are now an American.
(at least in my eyes)
At least another 200-500 years
I’ve thought this before.
Europe and the US still think they are relatively similar, or at least from the same origin, so I feel the strength of their alliance in the world has had a subtle ethnic component, but the two regions are going to diverge more and more given trends.
In 100 years, there will still be ethnically European people in America for example, but they’ll be a much smaller segment of the population.
Thus I’ve wondered if there will be a point when the Europe and the US diverge, or at least they end up not as close as the relationship today.
As for a distinct ethnic identify, it can and will happen but there’s no set number, maybe even within 100 years but it’s pointless to predict 100 years into the future.
As often happens with this sort of discussion, people are using differing definitions of “ethnicity”. Here is what the dictionary says:
>the social group a person belongs to, and either identifies with or is identified with by others, as a result of a mix of cultural and other factors including language, diet, religion, ancestry and physical features traditionally associated with race
So, using this definition, one could argue that “Black, Southern American” is an ethnicity. Or “White, liberal Southern Californian”, or any of the other zillion distinct social racial groups in the country.
But the bottom line is, any grouping including “race” as part of its definition is going to be pretty nebulous, because the concept of race is arbitrary and self-conflicting.
I think it’s happening, but it’s slow.
I’m a standard issue white guy born in the United States. But culturally, as someone who lived much of his life in the Great Lakes area, I feel like people in the western states have a completely different outlook and set of values than I do. I currently live in Wyoming. And I certainly don’t feel any cultural affinity with people from the South.
Are we all US Americans? Yes. We share a nationality. But I wouldn’t say I feel culturally at home away from the Great Lakes.
It’s not ethnic. Yet. Could it become that way? Possibly, but there’s a lot of internal mobility still. I’m an anecdotal point of reference. I think it would take a slowing of moving around the country and immigration to make it happen, but the seeds are there. But as of now, the way the country works won’t speed it along.
And never mind the whole Native American and race thing. That’s a whole other layer of complication.
I think in the U.S. the closest things we have are regional “ethnicities”.
For example, my ancestors on both sides have been in the Appalachian region since the 1600s-1700s. I was born in Appalachia, as were my parents.
Even on my Ancestry DNA it identified Appalachian as a regional grouping for me, but on my ethnicity estimate it’s all England, Scotland, Ireland, etc.
So culturally and even ethnically I consider myself Appalachian. It is more distinct than some other areas of the U.S. due to the geography keeping people very isolated. So the culture is more condensed and also the gene pool is more limited (no I’m not inbred 🙄)
But the country as a whole? No I don’t think it could ever be one ethnicity
According to the current American administration, there is one American ethnicity, and everyone else should leave.
It quite literally csnnot happen, no nationality of the New World or Austrlian or Singaporean is an etjnicity on the basisbof being a political identity.
There are some like Spain where its iffy but a country like USA cannot really become it
I miss Yugoslavia. I wish they coulda got their shit in order and kept their country together 😔
It probably doesn’t, but ethnicities are basically social constructs so if the USA considers itself to have one single ethnicity and the world broadly agrees, then it does.
I’d call it a culture more than an ethnicity